Brandon Wang

Work History

• 

  Software Engineer

  Riot Games

  March 2017 - Present
• 

  Technical Director

  Pixar

  June 2013 - February 2017

  Writing shading and surfacing software.
  
  • Lava (2014):
  - Mathematically derived and wrote shaders to achieve deformable vector displacement on large terrain.
  - Contributed tangent-space filtering code to Disney's open-source Ptex project.
  
  • Inside Out (2015):
  - Supported character shading tools, notably Mari.
  
  • The Good Dinosaur (2015):
  - Support for Renderman shaders.
  - Supported character shading tools, notably Mari.
  - Supported color space transformations for shading.
  
  • Piper (2016)
  - Prototyped real-time shading workflows for wet sand on a beach.
  
  • Finding Dory (2016):
  - Created optimized essential pattern shaders, such as texture reading and vector transformation.
  - Created new workflows for shading in Katana, including writing a custom nodegraph.
  - Created cross-department shader binding workflows.
  - Experimented with real-time panting workflows, including a full GLSL BSDF implementation.
  - Support for Renderman RIS shaders and related applications, notably Mari and Katana.
  
  • Cars 3 (2017):
  - Transitioned all authored shading into a unified, application agnostic USD representation.
  - Support for Renderman RIS shaders, USD shading, and related applications, notably Katana.
  
  • Coco (2017):
  - Developing experimental real-time GPU shading workflows.
  - Lead developer on Flow, a real-time GPU node-based shading authoring application.
  - Worked as a generalist engineer and project lead.
  - Expertise in nodegraph-based workflows, cross-application data, and OptiX/CUDA shaders.
  - Used on Coco to surface props.
• 

  Research Assistant

  UC Berkeley

  August 2011 - May 2013

  Researched extensions of sheared filtering for physically-based Monte Carlo ray tracing. Co-author of a paper in SIGGRAPH ASIA 2012 and SIGGRAPH 2013.
• 

  Graduate Student Instructor

  UC Berkeley

  August 2012 - December 2012

  Teaching assistant for CS184: Foundations of Computer Graphics
• 

  Software Engineer Intern

  Pixar

  May 2012 - August 2012

  • Contributed to the development and integration of lighting tools for Pixar’s 2013 short film, "The Blue Umbrella"
  • Worked closely with technical directors to address urgent show-stopping issues.
  • Collaborated with third party sources to address critical internal and external software issues.
• 

  Undergraduate Student Instructor

  UC Berkeley

  January 2012 - May 2012

  Teaching assistant for CS184: Foundations of Computer Graphics
• 

  Reader

  UC Berkeley

  September 2011 - December 2011

  • Graded homework and projects for UC Berkeley's Graphics Class (CS184)

• Computer Engineer Intern

  National Security Agency

  May 2011 - August 2011

  • Performed extensive binary analysis on embedded systems.
  • Identified significant vulnerabilities in communications systems.
  • Developed tools to advance computer network exploitation efforts.
  • Assisted in successful computer network exploitation operations.

• Software Engineer Intern

  National Security Agency

  May 2010 - August 2010

  • Key Developer on a high-priority, high-visibility Department of Defense Cloud Architecture project.
  • Created and deployed generalized analytics for distributed searches against large datasets in the Hadoop MapReduce environment.
  • Supported end-to-end testing and deployment of analytic.